We're back with Episode 2 of our new podcast the YVR REMO Show! This week's topic is about going from a townhouse to house for $50, BONUS: How the coronavirus affects your mortgage.



This episode features something new! Our show is now sponsored by Farm Country Brewing in Langley City! You may remember this brewery from a recent video we shared where we visited them and tried some of their amazing beers.

Back to the podcast!

The Coronavirus

The last few weeks have been interesting with real estate. The coronavirus is affecting mortgage interest rates. Yes, you heard that right. You might be asking how?

There's fear about the Chinese economy because of this virus. Manufacturing is at an all-time low, travel is being restricted, and tourism has slowed down which is dropping the economy in China. People are pulling out of stocks and putting their money into bonds. When the bond market gets flooded it brings the prices down. Bond rates are a secure investment. How is this relative to mortgage interest rates? If the bond markets are dropping, it will bring 5-year interest rates down as well. This creates a good reason to go for the variable interest rate because if the rates drop, you have the opportunity to lock-in.

Multiple Offers & Going Subject Free

Listings are at an all-time low right now and prices are starting to come back up. Buyer activity is through the roof.

Multiple offers are when there are multiple bidders on your home. Seeing a shift into a seller's market, we have some secrets to going subject free. First is always get an inspection at a showing. Bring an appraiser and inspector. Pre-approval letters are key, but this depends on where they come from. A bank can give you a letter, but make sure they have all the required documents in order to review your credit. You want to make sure you can be qualified after you make a subject free offer. You can go subject free in a shorter time span with some of these aspects taken care of ahead of time.

It can be risky going subject free, as appraisals generally get done after an offer has been made. We can fully qualify you but the lender needs to approve that property as well.

How Can You Upsize Your Home?

The number one type of product on the market right now is the single-family detached home. A lot of people making the move to detached homes were looking for properties with basement suites.

Example:

A client had purchased a townhouse in the Langley area in 2015. They have a $350,000 mortgage remaining on a property worth $550,000. We ran a scenario comparing keeping this townhouse vs. buying a single-family home in Abbotsford. What we found is that it only cost $50 to maintain the Abbotsford property. How is this possible? Let's break down some numbers. Let's assume this townhouse sold for $550,000. If you factor in strata fees of $300/month and property tax of $125/month. Combined with the mortgage, payment comes to just over $2,000/month. There's no rental income to help out, they are out of pocket for that $2,000. Upon selling and factoring in real estate fees, legal costs, and the remaining balance owed to the lender, they walk away with about $175,000. These same people bought a single-family home in Abbotsford for $850,000. Their 20% downpayment is about $170,000. The mortgage amount becomes $680,000. Because the downpayment amount was 20% we were able to do a 30-year amortization which is the longest mortgage you can obtain. On the townhouse, they put down 5% and were restricted to 25 years. The monthly payment on the new property is $2,850. This is where you can factor in rental income, which in this case was $1,100 a month bringing the monthly mortgage payment down to $1,750. This amount is only $50 more than what they paid for their langley townhouse! Some banks such as TD will use 50% of that rental income to help you qualify. Credit unions will use up to 90%.

Using a 2.5% appreciation rate, the townhouse is estimated to be worth $622,00 in 5 years. The detached home in Abbotsford, using that same appreciation rate, will be worth $961,000. The detached home went up in a bigger amount because of the higher purchase price.

To simplify this all, you can lower or keep your cost of living relatively the same while significantly seeing a bigger increase for your net wealth.

Key Points in Upsizing:

1) If you have enough equity, you can sell your house which will give you your downpayment and closing costs to cover the new purchase.

2) You can escape strata and get a detached home for anywhere from $50 to $100 a month.

3) Detached markets are known to appreciate stronger than a strata market would, creating more long-term wealth.

The YVR REMO Show airs every two weeks. Stay tuned to our YouTube channel above for new episodes. If you have any questions please contact us as we'd be happy to answer them for you!